Tuesday, January 19, 2010

#25 Shmutzville

This one is personal, and any of the 3 people that have been reading this will have little-to-no mind for anything I'm about to write. I'm writing for me, not for you.

What is Shmutzville? That's where I've been parking for the last eighteen months. You see, in this neighborhood, finding a parking spot is like finding a white chick Tiger Woods hasn't fucked. It's like finding a book you actually want to read at Barnes and Noble. It's like finding a black person in Santa Monica. Quite simply, it's like getting struck by lightning twice at once. So, my roommate and I made a deal: He got the underground parking spot, and I got the bathroom in my room. This forced me to go out and get a neighborhood parking permit. The problem is that parking is only permit NORTH of Franklin. Everything on Franklin or below is open to every tourist, club hopper, or shitkicking businessman in the area. So for me to get a parking spot, I either needed to luck out with a below-Franklin spot, or find one above Franklin with my permit.

The stretch above Franklin closest to me is on Whitley, which consists of exactly 18 parking spots, that are 90% of the time full. So that left a stretch of Wilcox, about a quarter miler away. I ended up parking here about 75% of the time that I came home. It was so far away, that I deemed it Schmutzville. Worse yet, on Sunday nights or Monday nights, morning street sweeping prohibited people form parking on a particular side of the street making parking even harder. I ended up all the way down Wilcox, up a hill, and in some random residential area a good 15 minute walk from my place. I would quickly deem this area "Outer Schmutzville"

So why will I be missing this decrepit part of Hollywood? Because it is my own little corner. Quite literally, Shmutzville was about as close as you can get to the hills to leaving the neighborhood. It abutted the 101 Freeway. It sat quietly beneath the Hollywood Sign with everyone's cameras pointed directly over it, leaving Shmutzville a quiet and deserted stretch of bullshit road.

I will miss having this little corner on the busiest neighborhood in LA. I will miss the long walk past the homelesses, the auto-shop, and the other dry-cleaner that I never used (despite constant complaints about my old dry cleaner). I will miss the peripheral friends asking me "do you have to walk out here all the time?" as if a five minute walk is akin to the Israelites walking through a desert. I will miss game 6 of the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals in which getting out of my car in Schmutzville, and having taped the first half, unaware of anything that had happened, I got a text from SDP that read "Well that was a fun season," prompting me to throw my complimentary meal from work in the middle of the street, leaving it there for the luckiest homelessman. I will miss walking towards the Hollywood sign on my way to my car, parking in front of people's houses no where near my place, and trying to explain what "Shmutzville" is to my friends. And I will miss the serene sense of security that no matter how busy my neighborhood is with bullshit and more bullshit, there's a parking spot for me, no where near my place, but always with my heart.